


Source Decay

by psikeval



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2014-04-04
Packaged: 2018-01-18 03:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1414114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psikeval/pseuds/psikeval
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winter Soldier coda fic.</p><p>Slowly, and never quite the way Steve imagined, Bucky comes home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Source Decay

I.

Bucky shows up on the mall. Too far away, slipping through a crowd of tourists by the World War II Memorial, there and gone. Being fast doesn’t mean a thing when Steve only sees him for the blink of an eye, but he sprints forward anyway, so fast even _his_ lungs burn. He’s standing alone just where Bucky had been, a murmuring crowd of passersby taking his picture on cell phones, when Sam catches up, gives him a careful look. Asks him if he’s sure.

It’s not an unfair question, on the face of it. But years ago Steve spent a lifetime knowing those particular shoulders, the long sloping strides beneath them. _Sure?_ Might as well ask if he knows his own—

Steve winces, clenches his fist, and Sam pretends not to notice.

 

II.

Bucky shows up in the Smithsonian; they both do. Steve keeps coming back, to wander through the relics meant to contain what’s worth knowing about his fallen friends. Ghosts of the past, staring out from old film. Mostly it feels like he’s the one doing the haunting.

In the dark room playing the video of Peggy, he looks up and sees Bucky standing in the exit, back pressed carefully up against the wall. There are still circles like bruises under his eyes; he’s too thin and too pale and he looks as ridiculous in his new jeans and sweatshirt as Steve feels some days. For a while neither of them moves.

It’s the best day Steve’s had in months, no matter how much it hurts.

He stays still. They both do.

When Bucky steps closer, he keeps a line of benches between them. Steve becomes aware that he’s holding his breath — which he can do for much longer than most, but. He makes himself inhale and exhale and tries to expect nothing, not an attack, not his best friend. They are here, alive, in this room together and asking for more feels unspeakably greedy.

More to make time pass than anything, he tries breathing exercises he learned from Dr. Banner, and if it doesn’t do much for him either, at least it gives Steve something else to put his mind on.

Pretense, at best. He breathes in and out and only thinks about _Bucky, here with me_.

When Bucky sits down a few inches away, it is gingerly, slowly. Not like an injured man, but like one hurt so badly for so long he no longer bothers to catalogue what is wound and what is body. All of it he treats like something raw and bloody. 

It’s wrong, it feels wrong and it twists in Steve’s heart. Bucky isn’t supposed to be wounded. 

(Which is true in plenty of ways — after all, he’s _supposed_ to be dead.)

They don’t speak. Steve wants to, thinks of something else say in every second they sit there, but every time he looks up he sees the sweat on Bucky’s face and the fear flooding his eyes, too much effort made already; he can’t bring himself to push. The video of Peggy starts up from the beginning, ends and starts again. On the third time through Bucky stands up and leaves.

“ _Even after he'd died, he was still changing my life_.”

 

III.

Bucky shows up at Peggy’s stateside funeral service.

She’ll be buried in England, on her family’s land, but almost everyone who knew her was here, around D.C., up and down the east coast. Family, friends, old neighbors. Members of SHIELD who barely knew her at all, just coming to pay their respects. Steve should appreciate that more, but he can’t. The kindly old woman they eulogize feels like a stranger, a shadow.

Everyone expects him to speak. There was no getting out of it; he’s Captain America and he knew her. It doesn’t matter if, standing there at the podium, all he can think of is the smell of her hair and the strength of her grip, the brisk, perfect way she’d punched Hodge in the face.

That red dress from seventy years ago, and how she’d smiled.

He gives a speech made up of the platitudes Maria Hill wrote out for him last week on index cards in her gleaming new office, her eyes only sad, not pitying. _I never know either,_ she’d said before he left. _Always used to make PR do it, no matter who it was._

Hill isn’t here today, and Steve envies her and hates himself.

Everyone else seems to like what he’s saying, whatever that is. He’s reciting the last of the words when he sees Bucky standing in the shade of an old magnolia, watching. The tree is dense and the day is cloudy, casting him almost entirely in shadow. None of that matters. It’s not as if Steve isn’t going to recognize him.

_It was a privilege to know her, and I will always consider her friendship one of the greatest honors I could ever have received._

Weak words for it all, but at least they ring true.

After, as the crowd tries to surround him with condolences and thanks, he finds himself edging away, toward the tree. Maybe later he’ll return to this place full of graves that aren’t hers and say something better, or maybe someday he’ll fly out to England. Right now he just wants the feeling of his best friend behind him, even if it’s a fiction.

He finally disentangles himself with a burst of polite smiles that feel like the last scrap of effort he can muster, and he walks away, alone, into the shade. He and Bucky watch the others leave together in silence—except for Steve’s breath, which is horribly loud in his ears, slow and ragged like he keeps forgetting how. He takes off his suit jacket, sits on it all hunched in on himself like he hasn’t been for years. After a while, when the sun is sinking in the sky, Bucky sits with him.

Their eyes meet.

“I know you,” Bucky says, certain, and Steve finally starts to cry.

 

IV.

Bucky shows up at Steve’s front door, looking like he’s about to run off any second.

He’s standing perfectly still, but skittish and wild and bloodshot in the eyes, sickly pale under jagged sheared-off hair. Probably did it himself with a knife; Steve can’t think of a single person who’d come near Bucky’s head with scissors these days.

“Hi,” he says, instead of mentioning the hour or how Bucky looks half-dead.

For a second Bucky looks ready to bolt all over again, but his chin dips down in the most cautious of nods. His eyes keep roving over Steve’s face like fingertips on a touchstone. “Hi.”

It’s been weeks since the funeral, could be weeks before this happens again. Months, even, before another glimpse of Bucky’s face. There are a million bad things that could happen out there, all of which Steve has mapped out in detail on the blank slate of his bedroom ceiling and no matter how selfish it makes him, waiting without knowing is too much for him to take.

And maybe it’s stupid and it’s going to ruin everything, but he has to ask.

“Do you want to come in?”

Like a miracle eighty years late, Bucky does.

 

V.

Bucky shows up at the breakfast table. It’s the earliest he’s ever been up so far; usually the nightmares keep him awake and he oversleeps to compensate, slipping hollow-eyed into the kitchen to reheat some coffee at noon. He needs to eat nearly as much as Steve to keep himself going, now, but he doesn’t. He’s never been this thin.

And in a way it’s a relief, because this one isn’t so complicated, doesn’t skirt so close to the edges of things that make Bucky wake up screaming and staring at Steve without a shred of recognition. It’s just payback for all the times Bucky’s mom stuffed sandwiches in Steve’s jacket pocket, or made him stay for dinner and dessert no matter what excuse he tried to make.

This, Steve can do.

He makes eggs, and bacon, and toast with too much jam the way Bucky always liked, fresh coffee and danishes from the bakery down the street, and he sits there watching until the plates are clean and Bucky is licking blackberry preserves and icing from his fingers. He tells stories about them as kids in New York, just letting them spill out the way they’ve been trying to for days, and never stops to ask when Bucky nods along, no matter how much he wants to.

“So. How d’you like the future?” The careful, rasping echo of his best friend’s voice dries up Steve’s ready replies about Google and food that isn’t boiled. He wipes his mouth and pushes the plate of bacon towards Bucky, tries to think.

“Most days? I don’t know,” he admits. “I mean, it’s good; it’s not that I regret being here or—”

“You know, I missed that stupid face you make when you try to tell a lie.”

Steve is startled into laughing, and from the way Bucky smiles it’s like he almost surprised himself. He’s wearing a clean shirt of Steve’s, hanging loose around his neck, and neither of them has stared too long at the metal arm resting on the table today.

“It’s really not so bad.”

“Uh-huh.” Sarcasm, it seems, is like riding a bike. “I’ve had a real picnic, let me tell you.”

“There are good things,” he insists. “It’s more that I’m just— I don’t know.”

“Waiting for the right partner?” Bucky smirks at him, annoying as hell and exactly like home.

Steve wants to correct him, say he’s remembered words without the right context —

— but maybe it’s not so wrong, at that.

 

\--

Bucky stays.

 

 

\--

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> There is now a sort of [coda to the coda](http://psikeval.tumblr.com/post/84022946999/does-it-steve-starts-and-stops-himself-just-as) on tumblr, written for [Chloe](http://splintmail.tumblr.com/). <3


End file.
